Immersion fluids are fluids which have a refractive index close to the refractive index of the glass used for sample carriers and lenses. If an air gap between an objective lens and a sample carrier is filled with such an immersion fluid, the numerical aperture of the objective increases. This results in increased light intensity and increased resolving power of the objective.
With increasing automation of work processes in microscopy, the demand for an automated supply of said immersion fluids has also increased. The reason for such a demand is the fact that the accessibility to the front of the objective of modern, particularly inverted, microscopes has become increasingly difficult due to the increasing complexity of the systems and the ever increasing objective aperture, and therefore, manual immersing is frequently no longer possible.
Inverted microscopes operating with immersion objectives are usually also provided with a protection device, designed to protect the microscope from the discharging immersion medium and other liquids. Such devices, which have elements in the form of protection devices attached to the objective, are, for example, described in DE 103 33 326 A1 and DE 100 50 825 A1. Even though an element attached to the objective provides a protected immersion film region, these solutions are disadvantageous because immersion fluid can leak within the entire system. Furthermore, the production-related effort is very high since a special protection device has to be provided for every objective.
Proceeding from the disadvantages of the solutions of the aforementioned prior art, the invention addresses the problem of further developing a device for forming an immersion film on an inverted microscope such that a leakage during supply and during microscopic examination at minimized production-related effort is virtually impossible.